We haven’t evaluated Facebook in our Cool IT Leaderboards, since it’s not yet offering services that can directly help us use our energy smarter and cleaner. But we do evaluate Google, and the company’s recent leadership with Duke Energy clearly fit into a larger trend, as it tied for the report’s lead.

The ranking found that Google and Cisco are leading the way, followed by Ericsson in third place, Fujitsu in fourth, and Sprint, Wipro and HP tied for fifth.

Many companies have continued to make progress in offering products and services to enable a renewably powered economy, and more companies increased their own commitment to renewable energy. However, despite the IT sector’s green ambitions, we won’t achieve transformational change – a real Energy Revolution – until technology companies use their political power to demand a shift to energy policies that will unlock investment in clean energy solutions.

Monopoly electric utilities, such as Duke Energy in the US or TEPCO in Japan, have shunned the innovative potential of the IT sector in favor of polluting, centralised electricity generation like coal and nuclear power. Those companies have dominated the power grids and markets for over 100 years in many parts of the world, and have entrenched their political power during that reign. But technology companies have political leverage too: they have amassed money and cultural power in recent decades, and can create a counterweight against the polluting lobby, but only if they use their political leverage to push for smarter, cleaner, more efficient energy grids and buildings.

We did find some positive signs of technology companies advocating for smarter energy policies in countries like the U.S., Japan and in India: Sprint, Google, Wipro, and SoftBank all prioritised policy changes to encourage investment in energy efficiency and renewable energy.

And while it wasn’t released in time to be included in this report, Google’s announcement that it would push utilities to deliver more renewable energy to large customers, a practice that will start with Duke Energy in North Carolina could be a potential breakthrough; Duke’s current energy mix is powered by only 0.2 % renewable energy in the Carolinas, a stark contrast to Google’s goal of being 100% renewably powered. Other companies ranked in the Leaderboard, like AT&T, Cisco, Google, IBM and Wipro all operate in North Carolina too, and could work together to follow Google’s lead and demand more renewable energy from Duke Energy, or step in to defend state renewable energy policies currently under attack by fossil fuel funded groups like the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).

Energy decisions this year are getting more and more crucial as we approach climate tipping points. If the technology giants of the world are going to use their voices to promote the smart energy solutions to climate change, they need to do so now.

Check out the report here and see how the brands that you use stack up in the tech sector’s efforts to embrace clean energy and help stop climate change.

Science only agrees it “COULD” be a crisis and has never said it “WILL” be a crisis or is imminent, eventual, unavoidable, certain, inescapable or unavoidable. Not one single IPCC warning is not swimming in “maybes” and “could bes” and “likelys” and “potentiallys”. Science agrees asteroid hits are real but climate change is not as real as an eventual asteroid hit. That is not consensus. That is not a crisis.
So how close to the point of no return from unstoppable warming will the world of science take us before they say it “WILL” happen, not just “might” happen.
Help my house could be on fire maybe?

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(Unregistered) theGranDuc
says:

Why is Nokia not on this list?
Nokia's Here.com location division, former navteq has massive numbers of servers, comparable to some of the r...

Why is Nokia not on this list?
Nokia's Here.com location division, former navteq has massive numbers of servers, comparable to some of the really big guys, to process all the location data it listens to from phones. These servers are located in server farms around the globe that are powered by the cheapest dirtiest energy possible. How come this is missing from your info?

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(Unregistered) fcoluccio
says:

David, with all due respect, your choices, or should I state your methods of ranking these companies, is in need of some serious reexamination, in my...

David, with all due respect, your choices, or should I state your methods of ranking these companies, is in need of some serious reexamination, in my opinion. I'd gladly discuss in detail if you're interested.

Briefly though, at best the list reflects how some (not all) firms successfully game their corporate social responsibility agendas, and in so doing actually cause a good thing to happen: they pass the message along to customers and other observers to pay more attention to environmentally responsible modes of operations, while improving operational efficiency and saving money to boot, since some of the "real" measures they take are actually beneficial at the margins too.

But such posturing is often merely "talking the talk". When it comes to walking the walk, I find that at least half of the top ten firms named are clinging on to technologies that tend to manifest grotesquelly inneficient and evnironmentally damaging outcomes.

More often than not, such vendors --especially those that enjoy signficant market powers, achieve these ends by proprietary "lock-in" frameworks that perpectuate technology paradigms for twenty or more years, ignoring Moore's Law almost entirely except in areas that make their systems bigger, more powerful and heavier consumers of energy. IMO, you couldn't have selected for your top rankings candidates with more opposite approaches, some of whom are constantly talking, while many of the others are actually doing the walk.